Social Media for Restaurant Marketing

Social media can be a practical, affordable and effective means to market your restaurant. While it shouldn’t be the exclusive component in your restaurant marketing plan, these days it could reasonably be the primary marketing tactic.

Social media, sites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter allow you to build a following and in some cases place paid posts as well. Followers share mutual interests and the platform allows you to interact with them in a way that resembles a one on one conversation.

For a restaurant owner this is a great opportunity to engage with new and existing customers and to entice repeat business.

Social Marketing is Sharing Your Brand Message

You should already have a clear sense of your restaurant’s brand and what your message is before ramping up your promotions on social media. To get the most out of your efforts, everything you’re doing to market should directly reinforce the branding that you’ve decided on, based on your target customer.

To learn about restaurant branding and defining your target customer check out the rest of our restaurant marketing tips.

What’s great about social media is that you can communicate your brand message in a very personal and sincere way, by interacting directly with your online followers.

When interacting online, you want to always put your best foot forward. You can express an opinion on a topic, but you must first make sure that opinion it fits into your branding strategy.

Be especially careful about polarizing subjects or sharing views that are not relevant to your restaurant marketing message. Most important of all, do not mix up your personal profile and your business profile! Make sure that you always use your professional page to engage with customers. This allows you to keep control of how your restaurant is perceived by customers while still having the freedom to be yourself.

You should already have a clear sense of your restaurant’s brand and what your message is before ramping up your promotions on social media. To get the most out of your efforts, everything you’re doing to market should directly reinforce the branding that you’ve decided on, based on your target customer.

To learn about restaurant branding and defining your target customer check out the rest of our restaurant marketing tips.

What’s great about social media is that you can communicate your brand message in a very personal and sincere way, by interacting directly with your online followers.

When interacting online, you want to always put your best foot forward. You can express an opinion on a topic, but you must first make sure that opinion it fits into your branding strategy.

Be especially careful about polarizing subjects or sharing views that are not relevant to your restaurant marketing message. Most important of all, do not mix up your personal profile and your business profile! Make sure that you always use your professional page to engage with customers. This allows you to keep control of how your restaurant is perceived by customers while still having the freedom to be yourself.

Don’t Be “That Guy”

Repeated solicitations or posting the same content in multiple discussion groups that you recently joined is like pestering someone to buy from you. Don’t expect to get any new followers with one-way communication.

Desperate self-promotion doesn’t work in online marketing and can be dangerous to your brand image. Unsophisticated posts can inspire resentment and attract the wrong kind of viral attention — negative and rude comments.

It should go without saying, but these last two behaviors can really cause you long term problems if engaged in. Never type in all capital letters. No one will care what you have to say if it’s in all caps and many internet users will find it personally offensive.

Never get into any arguments on your restaurant page or while using your restaurant profile name. Even if you’re right and people seem to be supporting your position it can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and many who see it won’t want to be associated with the drama. Instead, keep it light and be helpful. You don’t have to reply if you’ve already made a good faith effort to help.

Think Broadly About Your Target’s Interests

It would be a mistake to make all of your posts to social media about your food, events or promotions. You will make posts sharing your promotions and events, but you want to do so strategically. Use your creativity to build buzz around your events. Take your time so that these offers and promotions seem special.

Consider that the majority of your posts would be classified as marketing rather than as promotions. The difference is that marketing generates interest in your restaurant and says something about the thoughts, feelings and ideas you want to have associated with your brand.

Promotions is “asking for the sale”. You certainly want to ask for the sale but you’ve got to gain interest and provide something of value first. Post enjoyable content that will be shared, get likes, positive comments, and encourage attention and engagement from your target market.

If you want to keep your target audience engaged with your social media posts, you need to provide something of value that will interest them.

Of course, you want to experiment with your social media restaurant marketing as well. The great thing about social media is that you get instant feedback in the form of likes, shares, and retweets. This can be viewed as a type of voting from your fans.

Over time you’ll learn to recognize the type of content that they like. Their feedback will help to shape the way you market your restaurant as time goes on. The great part about this feedback loop is that as you continue to engage with your target customers you’ll get a clearer sense of who they are and how to communicate with them. This will be instrumental in your restaurant’s successful marketing in other areas as well.

This article is a free resource provided by Rezku. Rezku is a restaurant management systems developer founded by a seasoned restaurant owner. The goal of Rezku is to provide the hospitality industry with easy to use, affordable technology, backed by great service. Rezku’s solutions include restaurant point of sale and systems for the host stand facilitating table management, waitlist and reservations.

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